Tuesday, seven in the afternoon. It is raining and cold in Gijón. While I wait to enter a multiplex theater (not all films are shown in the elegant Jovellanos), I notice that there are only queues for the festival sessions. For the rest of the rooms, there is no one waiting. It’s one of the paradoxes of festivals: people who barely go to the movies the rest of the year, bingeing 10 or 15 films in a week.
It is the attraction of the event, the call of the event. It’s not going to the cinema, it’s going to the festival: enjoying the “ambient atmosphere”, the meetings with the filmmakers after the film (Gijón takes maximum care of that aspect), the parallel activities… Now that almost all cinema is accessible online, that is the function of festivals that are not aimed at the industry, such as Cannes or Venice: to create meeting places and cultural promotion.
Below we review 10 of the most outstanding films of the 63rd edition of the Gijón/Xixón International Film Festival (FICX). A year in which Richard Linklater has shone brightly. What two movies!
‘Nouvelle Vague’: this is how ‘At the end of the getaway’ was made
If you don’t care about the nouvelle vague, you don’t connect with the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard and you haven’t seen (and revered) ‘At the End of the Break’, you will find Richard Linklater’s new film as interesting as a book about the “art of bullfighting” does to me. ‘Nouvelle Vague’ is drug for movie buffs, a party, a celebration, a big bag of cinematic chips, Linklater’s ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’.
The Texan director is not fooling anyone: ‘Nouvelle Vague’ is, purely and simply, an eternal love letter to the film that illuminated modern cinema. The film recreates the filming of ‘À bout de souffle’ in the key of cinematic comedy and imitating the visual calligraphy of the work itself. The result is a fake making of that is as charming as it is fun. Linklater doesn’t bow like a solemn fan, but adopts the same attitude as his characters when they mock Godard’s intellectual verbosity: complicity, affection and tons of admiration. 8’6
‘Blue Moon’: sad song by Richard Linklater
‘The Lady Is a Tramp’, ‘My Funny Valentine’, ‘Blue Moon’… and so on up to a thousand songs. The now-forgotten lyricist Lorenz Hart formed a popular duo with composer Richard Rodgers on Broadway in the 1920s and 1930s, later eclipsed by Rodgers’ overwhelming success with Oscar Hammerstein (‘The Sound of Music’, ‘The King and I’).
Richard Linklater approaches the tragic figure of Hart (he died of alcoholism at the age of 48) by recreating a single night in his life: the premiere of the successful musical ‘Oklahoma!’ (1943), the first work that Rodgers composed without him. Starring a sensational Ethan Hawke – in what could be the best performance of his career – ‘Blue Moon’ is a biopic that moves away from the usual Wikipedian appearance to offer a portrait of the character that is more psychological than biographical, more focused on transmitting his character and sensitivity through words (the film is wonderfully written) than on listing his life and miracles. 8’5
‘The currents’: a woman under the influence
Preceded by enthusiastic reviews at the Toronto and San Sebastián festivals (with whom the FICX maintains a collaboration agreement materialized in the Crossroads section), the new film by Milagros Mumenthaler (‘The Idea of a Lake’, ‘Open Doors and Windows’) was screened in Gijón wrapped in an inevitable halo of sadness: the Swiss-Argentine director was married and has a son in common with the recently deceased Fran Gayo, the festival’s programmer. member of the historic duo Mus.
‘The currents’ allows itself to be carried away by the flow of stylists of image and word such as Hitchcock, Antonioni or Virginia Woolf to construct a mysterious, misty and elusive story about the emotional instability and existential dissatisfaction of a woman, a successful fashion designer who seems to have everything in life. Mumenthaler fascinatingly mixes image and sound, silences and inner voices, to compose a kind of fever dream where the limits between what is real and what is imagined begin to blur, as if the protagonist’s own emotional state contaminated the staging. Another example (‘Trenque Lauquen’, ‘Los criminales’) of the extraordinary vitality of Argentine auteur cinema. 8’5
‘The secret agent’: the “sharks” of the dictatorship
It was one of the great winners of Cannes: Best Director (Kleber Mendonça Filho), Best Actor (fabulous Wagner Moura) and Critics’ Prize. The director of ‘Bacurau’ and ‘Doña Clara’ uses the narrative and aesthetic codes of the American political thriller of the 70s to construct a parable about the Brazilian military dictatorship.
Splendidly set in 1977 in Recife (the production design is magnificent), ‘The Secret Agent’ reflects the climate of fear, violence and corruption that exists in the country through the story of an enigmatic official who flees from a turbulent past and is besieged by the hitmen of a powerful company related to the regime. From this main plot, the film opens in various directions: political allegory, a portrait of the society of the time (much of the story takes place during carnivals), historical and cinephile memory (including the screening of ‘Jaws’ and ‘The Prophecy’) and even a detour into the most bizarre B-movie horror. 7’9
‘Father Mother Sister Brother’: the family according to Jarmush
Brand new winner of the Golden Lion at the recent Venice Film Festival, ‘Father Mother Sister Brother’ returns us to the Jim Jarmush of the episodic films of his beginnings, such as ‘Mystery Train’ (1989) or ‘Night on Earth’ (1991). Accompanied by a luxury cast –Tom Waits, Adam Driver, Charlotte Rampling, Cate Blanchett…-, the director tells three stories connected by the same thematic thread: family relationships.
The first two are magnificent: two variations on the same theme – a pair of siblings who go to visit their father or mother -, full of humor, melancholy and reflections on lack of communication, emotional distance and the roles we play when we are as a family. Jarmush plays with repetitions to establish rhymes full of comedy, deploying a minimal but precise staging that enhances the weight of the silences. I connected less with the third story, perhaps due to its tonal imbalance with respect to the previous ones: the story of two brothers who meet again to visit their deceased parents’ house. It is tender, emotional and closes the whole well, but it lacks the sparkle and lightness of the other two pieces. 7’8
‘To the west, in Zapata’: the forgotten
The beginning of ‘Al Oeste, en Zapata’, winner of the Best Film award, is impressive. As if it were a sequence shot from a Béla Tarr film, photographed in expressive black and white, we see a man from behind advancing through a swamp while carrying on his shoulders a crocodile that he has just hunted with his own hands. It is a shot of great visual and dramatic force that serves as the gateway to the world of a couple that (survives) in one of the most inhospitable places in Cuba.
A mix of anthropological documentary, denunciation film (the radio broadcasts non-stop propaganda speeches from the regime) and intimate family portrait (the couple raises an autistic son in extreme conditions), David Bim’s debut delves into the routine of this marriage with a patient and respectful look, avoiding both miserabilistic exploitation and grandiose epic, trusting in the power of the environment and the humanity of the characters. One of those FICX films where you go in “blind” (like last year’s ‘Mother Vera’) and come out almost enlightened. 8
‘A pied d’œuvre’: bohemians of the 21st century
Valérie Donzelli (‘Declaration of War’, ‘Only for Me’) adapts the best-selling autobiography by Franck Courtès (her script won an award at the Venice Film Festival). ‘A pied d’œuvre’ updates the myth of the bohemian artist. The film tells the story of a successful photographer (fantastic Bastien Bouillon, one of the best French actors of the moment) who abandons a position of privilege at work and family to devote himself to his true vocation: writing.
Through his daily life, accepting all kinds of precarious jobs to survive while he writes – a very fruitful period from a creative point of view but emotionally and materially exhausting – the film draws an intimate portrait of the contemporary fragility of the artist, always divided between the need to create and the urgency of making ends meet. Donzelli sensitively observes how this precariousness, far from being romanticized, leaves scars, but also opens a space for freedom and the search for one’s own voice. 7’7
‘Stereo Girls’: pop and death
Caroline Deruas, ex-wife of Philippe Garrel, directs her second feature film, starring her daughter, Lena Garrel. Yes, all very “nepobaby”. But this sensation is diluted as soon as the wonderful songs composed by Calypso Valois sound, we meet the two protagonist friends (Garrel is accompanied by Louiza Aura, known for ‘The Drama Queens’) and we find ourselves swept away by a very fine-tuned narrative that mixes musical comedy with a coming of age that is as bright as it is hard and deeply dramatic.
The director starts from an autobiographical event (the film is set in the 90s) to tell a simple and beautiful story of teenage friendship, with music as a vital impulse (they are fans of Les Rita Mitsouko and want to go to Paris to succeed as a musical duo). Light and carefree like a pop song, ‘Stereo Girls’ ends up revealing itself to be a deeper film than it appears: a vibrant and melancholic portrait of the euphoria, the wounds and the intensity of a few years in which everything seems possible (the original title is ‘Les Immortelles’). 7’5
‘For Adam’s sake’: a nurse against the system
Laura Wandel burst onto the European cinema scene with the forcefulness of a punch to the stomach. Her brutal approach to bullying from the point of view of children in ‘A Small World’ positioned her as one of the most promising filmmakers of the present, a sort of heir to the Dardenne brothers but with her own perspective.
In ‘For Adam’s Sake’, the Belgian director continues to explore the world of childhood, although this time from the point of view of a pediatric nurse (extraordinary Léa Drucker). The admission to the hospital, under a court order, of a malnourished child will be the trigger for an intense medical drama, articulated around the conflict between child protection protocols and the complexities of each particular case, between cold institutional logic and the human gaze of who must apply those rules. Although it lacks the subtlety and dramatic power of the previous one, ‘For Adam’s Sake’ is as good as an episode of ‘The Pitt’ filmed by the Dardennes could be. 7’7
‘A day with Peter Hujar’: the longest day
There was a lot of expectation to see the new film by Ira Sachs, who was also going to be in Gijón to present it. The Jovellanos theater received the author of ‘Passages’ and ‘Keep the Lights On’ with a standing ovation, but said goodbye to his film with timid applause.
‘A day with Peter Hujar’ recreates the recording of the conversation between Peter Hujar and Linda Rosenkrantz that took place in 1974, in which the famous photographer explained how a normal day in his life went. Sachs narrates the encounter emulating, with brilliance and notable evocative capacity, the forms of New York underground cinema. Ben Whishaw shines playing Hujar (he won the award for best actor) and Rebecca Hall, in a very thankless role, gives him the sober response. The problem is that what Hujar tells is of very limited interest except for the photographer’s big fans. Perhaps, as a style exercise for a short, it would have been a pass, but as a feature film it takes forever. 5
